From June, 1918, onwards, all hope of a German victory on the Western Front had disappeared. Germany was seething with discontent, her industrial life was paralised, the supply of munitions had seriously decreased; yet Ludendorff persevered, he drove the armies with remorseless energy, a kind of madness possessed him and his acolytes, imposing desperate courses and blinding them to facts. Their whole political existence was at stake, failure meant loss of place and power, of all that made life sweet, so they conceived a sinister design—if they failed “all else should go to ruin and become a prey.”
When the crash came, it came from within. For months, the German armies on the front had been a facade screening a welter of misery and starvation. The machine had functioned soullessly, causing the useless massacre of thousands of soldiers, while women and children died by tens of thousands in the midst of fictitious opulence. During these last days, the rank and file fought without hope, for an Emperor who was to save himself by flight, for leaders who treated them like pawns, for the defence of hearths and homes where famine and disease were rife. Long years of discipline had made these men automatons, they were parts of a great projectile whose momentum was not yet exhausted, and they had long ceased to reason why.
Unreasoning docility is held by some to be a civic virtue: that was the German doctrine and the basis of their Military System, which, though at its inception a defensive system, became an instrument of conquest, pride and insolence, a menace to the world. The form of war which Germany initiated and perfected has degraded war itself, it has organized slaughter with mechanical devices, has made tanks of more account than brains, and has crowned the triumph of matter over mind. There was a redeeming glamour about war as made by Alexander and Napoleon, today it is a hideous butchery, which can be directed by comparatively mediocre men. It has ceased to be an art and has become an occupation inextricably interwoven with a nation’s industrial life.
The downfall of the German Military System is a stern reminder of the vicissitude of things, and has removed a brooding shadow which darkened civilization. If calamitous experience serves as a guide to statesmen in the future, its rehabilitation will be prevented—in any form, however specious, in any land.
CHAPTER XV
The Peace Conference at Paris—1919
“Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the power and spirit of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures which pursue either at the expense of the other are compelled to stand aside—cities will never rest from their evils, no—nor the human race, as I believe.”—Plato.
Four days before the official declaration of war on Germany by the Government of the United States, President Wilson made a speech before the American Congress which contained the following passage:[43] “We shall fight ... for Democracy ... for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.” A few months later the same spokesman of a free people declared:[44] “They (men everywhere) insist ... that no nation or people shall be robbed or punished because the irresponsible rulers of a single country have themselves done deep and abominable wrong.... The wrongs ... committed in this war ... cannot and must not be righted by the commission of similar wrongs against Germany and her allies.” Later still, when the victory of Democracy had become certain, a forecast of the terms of peace was given by the same authoritative voice:[45] “In four years of conflict the whole world has been drawn in, and the common will of mankind has been substituted for the particular purposes of individual States. The issues must now be settled by no compromise or adjustment, but definitely and once for all. There must be a full acceptance of the principle that the interest of the weakest is as sacred as the interest of the strongest. That is what we mean when we speak of a permanent peace.”
These and a number of similar utterances had produced a deep effect throughout the world. The ruling classes in Europe professed to regard them as merely propaganda, and not to be taken seriously, but they could not escape the uneasy consciousness that their own methods in the past were being arraigned before an unpleasantly public court of justice. Moderate opinion in all countries was disposed to welcome these bold statements of democratic principles as furnishing a convenient bridge to a more advanced stage in political evolution, views which would have been condemned as sentimental, and even anarchic, in a humbler social reformer, on the lips of a President were considered as a statesman’s recognition of the logic of hard facts. The masses thought they were the “plain people,” for whom and to whom the President had spoken, and in their hearts had risen a great hope.